Total Upkeep backups failing due to max execution time

Hi Terry,

Thanks for reaching out with your Total Upkeep questions. I’m not sure that max_exec_time is the exact cause of this issue. 120 seconds should be sufficient but I’ve seen websites with much higher max_exec_times. There could very well be some other hosting/server limitation causing your issue.

Total Upkeep makes a log every time you create a backup, so that’s going to be the place you want to check first. Navigate to Total Upkeep > Tools > Logs and look for your most recent log. It will have a name like archive-XXXXXXXX.log. If you can copy that log and paste it here, we’ll be able to get some more information about what went wrong with your backup.

If a backup does not complete, and you don’t get any error messages in your log, there’s a good chance that your hosting provider / server may be auto killing the backup process. What you can do is run a Sanity Check Backup to check this. Performing a “Sanity Check Backup” – involves only backing up .txt files, to make sure the backup process can complete successfully. If it does complete, this helps to further indicate a possible server intervention.

In order to run the Sanity Check you’ll need to create a “custom backup” and in the includes section For “Files & Folders” enter *.txt. Also exclude all database tables from your backup.

After your backup completes, visit your logs section to verify that it did. This sanity check will let us know if this issue is with your backup itself or if there’s something going on outside of that like with your server or hosting resource limits.

Changing your backup compressor type might also help to get your backups up and running. To do so, navigate to Total Upkeep > Settings > Backup Process. If System Zip is available, choose that option. System Zip is significantly faster than the PclZip or ZipArchive libraries, and may use fewer resources. Attempt to create another backup using the Default compression level.

If the backup still fails, try reducing the Compression Level. A setting of 0 will not compress the backup at all, using the lowest amount of CPU and memory. This does mean that the Disk Input/Output is increased due to the larger file size, however.

If your backups are still failing after switching the Backup Compressor and Compression Level, set the Compression Level back to Default, and check the box to enable the Filelist Analysis. Attempt to create another backup. Navigate to Total Upkeep > Tools > Logs, and look for the most recent log that ends in filelist.log. Examine the filelist and look for any very large files or directories. You can then delete those files if you don’t need them, or exclude them from your backups to conserve resources.

I hope this helps Terry! Please let us know if there’s anything else that we can answer for you.